


Blueblood

by kenaz



Category: Bluebeard (Fairy Tales) - Fandom, Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms, La Barbe bleue | Bluebeard - Charles Perrault
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Horror, Other, Queer Themes, Transgender, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-25
Updated: 2010-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-14 02:28:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A 1980's re-imagining of Bluebeard on the Christopher Street Piers: Note that the story contains harsh language and violence which some people may find triggering. If you are sensitive to depictions of violence, please proceed with caution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blueblood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trifles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trifles/gifts).



> First, thank you for pushing me well out of my comfort zone. I feel as if I should apologize for making such a grim offering on Christmas morning-- but you can't say you didn't ask for it. This idea struck me at 9pm. Five hours later, here it is: Yuletide Madness, indeed! Please forgive any errors which may be lurking-- 'Tis the nature of such a late-striking beast. With any luck, I'll get one more chance to look it over before the archive opens. I have not written a lesbian or transgendered character before, and I hope I have done so with sensitivity and without falling victim to too many tired stereotypes. If I have fallen short in this attempt, please let me know how I can approach the theme in a more appropriate fashion. The character of Trina was largely informed by a real transgendered teenage prostitute, Venus Xtravaganza, whose life and violent death were presented in the 1990 documentary 'Paris is Burning.'

Summer's been hot and humid. The air down here, way at the end of Christopher Street, reeks of dead fish and Coppertone and pot smoke. But even though my shirt's been stuck to my back all day, the wind picks up off the water at night and it goes right through you. I can still see the last rays of the sun as it goes down somewhere in New Jersey. I mean, I know that it’s, like, a million miles away or something, but the way it looks from the Piers, it’s like Hoboken is the end of the world.

The corners of Miz Chardonnay’s MISSING posters flap and rattle in the breeze where they’re not taped down to lamp posts and twisting curls of broken chain link fence: faded xeroxes with grainy photographs and descriptions written in a slanting hand, names penned in beneath faces I can hardly make out: Carla, Vanessa, Jeanie... some of them I recognize, but most of them I don’t. I haven’t been hanging around here all that long, just since the weather got warm.

Trina has her arms wrapped around herself, her pale, flat belly showing beneath a cut-off t-shirt. Goosebumps pucker on her skin; I get cold just watching her. She looks so tiny and sweet, ankles wobbling a little in her fuck-me pumps, and she’s not even a girl, not really. Well, not yet, anyway. Surgery ain't cheap, and it's not like Medicaid pays for it, so that's why she's down here. She doesn’t like me hanging around when she’s on the pier. She’s working, she tells me; I tell her that standing around pouting her lips and sticking her hip out like a fake model isn’t really work.

“Like you can talk,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Being a lookout for a dealer ain’t a real job, either. Or cleaning Miz Chardonnay’s apartment, or panhandling, or breaking into people’s apartments and stealing shit and fencing it on Avenue A, or any of that other shit you do.”

I guess she’s right: neither of us have real jobs. Not, like, jobs you go to every day and get a paycheck for. When Trina says she’s going to work, she means she’s going to the pier to turn tricks; when I say I’m going to work, it might mean that I’m going to climb up a few fire escapes and see if I can find an open window, or that I'm going up to Washington Street to see if Jazz wants someone to keep their eyes peeled for cops. But it’s money, and we all need money, and it’s not like we can get real jobs because we’re both underage and we both dropped out of school.

Trina shivers. I offer her my sweatshirt and she looks at me like I’m stupid. “I’m trying to show my shit off, not hide it.” She waves it away like it smells bad or something, and her voice cracks a little bit. Her eyeliner is electric blue, a thick swath around her eyes that makes them pop out of her face. Sometimes, when nothing's going on, she tries to put makeup on me, but I won’t have none of that garbage. “Just ‘cos you’re a dyke don’t mean you can’t look good,” she tells me. “It’s not like there’s some sort of law that you got to go around dressed like some diesel mechanic.” I just roll my eyes. Makeup looks good on her but it's not my thing.

But Trina's not talking about makeup tonight; she’s going on and on and on about Blueblood again, the magical john who rescues damsels from the West Side Highway. Jesus Christ, am I sick of hearing about this guy! I don’t even believe he really exists. The world is just not that good; not to people like us.

The Blueblood story is this: there’s this guy, right? Upper East Side, works on Wall Street or some shit, more money than God, and instead of spending it on blow like some normal rich guy, he cruises the Piers, and then takes some lucky girl back to his place and sets her up good. Some of his girls become models, some of them go off to Hollywood and act. And surgery: he pays for their surgery so they can be “real” girls. 

That's what got Trina all interested-- surgery. Trina really wants it, top and bottom. But she’s been taking hormones for a while now and her boobs are practically bigger than mine already. Not like that’s saying much, but still. I had surgery once, when I was little. I had my tonsils taken out and it hurt like a bitch and the anesthesia made me throw up. I don’t know why anyone would willingly have themselves cut open. I’ve told her having a pussy ain't always what it’s cracked up to be, but there’s no convincing her. Even when I’m practically doubled over with cramps, she’s telling me that she wishes she could have my ovaries and my uterus, and I’m like, fine, let’s just go ahead and trade, ‘cos this period shit just sucks. It’s like she thinks that once she has the surgery, everything will magically change for her. It’s her big dream; Trina's stupid like that. Sometimes I want to tell her that dreams don’t come true, and even if she had the surgery it wouldn’t change anything, but mostly I just want her to be happy, so I keep my mouth shut. I mean, who am I to shit all over someone else’s dreams just because mine haven’t ever come true?

So, yeah: Trina’s all about this Blueblood guy, and how one of these nights he’s gonna come down here and sweep her off her feet and take her away from all this, from the piers, from the guys who beat the shit out of her and take her money, or beat the shit out of her because they’re too damn stupid to know that the girls on the piers all have dicks, and from the Police, who stand there while she shakes and cries and shrug their shoulders like they just don’t give a shit and tell her “What’d you think was going to happen to you? You’re out here asking for it.” Like she isn’t even a person. Maybe this dream is all she’s got left. I don’t know. I just don’t want to see her get her heart broken. 

“I’ll make him fall in love with me,” she says, her blue-rimmed eyes getting all shiny and far-away looking, like she's staring at something only she can see. “Maybe he’ll marry me and take me to live in Westchester, in a huge house, and get me a car.”

I don’t even bother to answer her; I grew up in Mount Vernon, which is technically Westchester, but pretty much the Bronx, and I can tell her all sorts of ways that Westchester just sucks, but she doesn’t want to hear it. She thinks it’s all rich white people with big houses and cars. 

“I’m not going to end up some bitter old queen like Chardonnay,” she sniffs. “I’m not going to be some drunk-ass old faggot who hates everyone who can claw their way out of here. I’m not like that.” Now she’s practicing this thing she does sometimes, pretending to look shy. She says some guys like that. I’m not a guy, but I guess I’d like it if some girl looked at me that way. Hell, I’d just like it if some girl looked at me at all. Miz Chardonnay tells me that I’m not going to meet any nice lesbians down on the pier, that it's a boy's town out here. I know she’s right-- I’m just as much a misfit here as I was in Mount Vernon-- but I don’t know where else to go. The only other dykes I know are like grown-ups, or they’re on some sort of crusade to get me to go back to school or something. I haven’t met any girls my age who like girls; just a handful of girls who like boys and girls who _are_ boys.   


“Miz Chardonnay’s not bitter,” I say, feeling protective. Yeah, she's old, but lets me sleep on her couch sometimes in exchange for running errands and cleaning her place for her. “She’s just drunk." And when she drinks, she starts crying about Carla and Vanessa and Jeanie and the others who have gone away and left her behind. She talks about them like they’re dead, not rich and working in LA or walking a runway somewhere, and makes these morbid MISSING posters for them that flap around the sides of lampposts like dying birds. “Ok, drunk and lonely.” But still, I don’t think Trina’s being quite fair. No one wants to be the one left behind. I know _I_ don't.

“She has a loaded gun in her nightstand!” Trina crows, then purses her lips and cocks her head. “Bitch is bitter and drunk and batshit-crazy!" She punctuates her words with diva snaps, graceful even when she's throwing shade. "One of these days she's gonna kill somebody and it's gonna be a _bad scene_.”

“She’s been bashed, for fuck’s sake!” I would have thought Trina would be more sensitive-- it’s happened to her, too. Happens to most of the girls on the piers after a while.

“Yeah," she rolls her eyes at me, the bright blue streak flashing beneath the whites, "during Stonewall. That's, like, before we were even _born_.” Trina isn’t particularly interested in history, even when it applies to her. “Everyone got bashed then.” 

"You know, you can be a total bitch when you want to. Especially when you're working." I'm tired of listening to her diss people and I want a smoke, so I just leave her there, pacing like an angry cat in front of the concrete barrier that keeps us from falling into the water. Big chunks of it are missing, like somebody took a sledgehammer to it, and it has SILENCE=DEATH spray painted on it in giant pink letters almost the same shade as Trina's skirt.

An hour later, she's still there, standing in the spotlight of a streetlamp, looking cold and pissed off. I think about offering her my sweatshirt again, but I don't. I just walk away.

* * *

Six nights in a row now, Trina's babbling about Blueblood, and how he’s going to make her life perfect. So I start thinking, ok, well, why not me? Maybe this guy would take me with him, too. I mean, I could probably make myself do it with a man once or twice and fake like I like it if it meant I could go live in some awesome apartment on the Upper East Side and have money to burn. Maybe he wouldn’t even want to have sex with me. Maybe he’d just adopt me. Give me birthday presents. Not hate me for being a dyke. You know, all that shit parents are supposed to do. Maybe he needs a butler. Or a cleaning lady. Or someone who can run errands for him. I don’t want much; just a little room of my own. It doesn’t even need to be fancy. I see now how easy it is to get all caught up in a dream, of wishing for it to be true so much it makes your heart hurt.

But then, on the seventh night, he comes.

He has a purple Porsche 944 that he parks on West Street and he’s got on an expensive suit. I mean, I’m guessing it’s expensive. I don’t see a lot of guys in suits around here. Spandex, yes; suits, no. But I can tell just by looking at it that it’s totally expensive. It’s got to be. He’s twirling a silver key ring around his fingers. His hair is silver, too, like a wolf. He’s got tanned skin, like he probably has his own island somewhere, and a private plane to take him there on the weekends. He scans the pier with shrewd eyes and I can tell that he’s looking for something, for someone. Like he’s hunting. Suddenly, I’m so eager, so close to getting a taste of this crazy dream of mine that I can’t even help myself. I sorta jog over to him and smile.

“Hey, Mister. What are you looking for?”

He looks down at me and kind of makes a face like what I said was funny. “Not you,” he says.

But now that I’m imagining my own room, maybe even my own bathroom, and running around the city going, “Mr. Blueblood needs this” and “I’m picking that up for Mr. Blueblood,”-- or maybe even “My _father_ , Mr. Blueblood, said I could pick out anything I wanted,” I’m not about to take the brush-off. “Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for,” I shrug, trying to look cute and helpful, “I can find it for you.”

He stops and look down at me again, and something flickers in his eyes. I don’t know what it is, but it me uncomfortable. I can feel my stomach clench a little. “I’m looking for a girl,” he says. His tone is patient-but-not-patient. Somewhere inside me, it’s like a nail is being dragged down a chalkboard, and I don’t know why.

“I’m a girl,” I tell him. I want to add “a _real_ girl,” but I don’t want to hurt Trina’s feelings. “Just ‘cos I got short hair don’t mean I ain’t a girl.” 

But he’s not even listening. He’s looking at Trina, and Trina’s looking at him. She’s doing that fake-shy-thing, and I sort of want to kick her in the teeth. Suddenly, I hate her. I hate everyone. I hate the fact that she’s going to go away with this guy and become rich and famous and leave me here on this shitty scrap of wood and asphalt with a bunch hookers and crackheads and no friends at all but Miz Chardonnay,who's old and sad and drunk. She’s going to get her dream, but I’m never going to get mine. I’m feeling all sorts of spiteful when my mouth opens, and before I can help it, I’m saying “She ain’t no girl, mister. She got a dick.”

Trina looks at me like she wants to kill me, like I’ve just ruined everything, and I automatically feel sorry I’ve said it, but it’s too late: the words are out there, floating around on the air like a plastic bag caught in the wind. The man, though, he just laughs. But it’s not a nice laugh; it’s hard and mean, and again, I get that weird feeling in my belly like something very wrong is happening, but I can’t figure out what.

He clamps his hand down on my shoulder and squeezes so hard it hurts. It feels like a warning, like he’s trying to tell me how easy it would be to break me. “Even with a dick,” he says, each word clear and perfectly formed as a little knife, “she’s more woman than you’ll ever be.” Then he gives me a shove. Not hard enough to push me over, but enough to make me stagger backward. If some guy ever did that to Trina, I’d threaten to cut his balls off, but she won’t do that for me, not after I said what I said. Tears spring up in my eyes, which makes me even madder. I can’t help being the way I am, and I can’t help it that I’m not like other girls, it just is what it is! It’s like when my parents said I couldn’t live in their house anymore unless I was willing to act like a girl. “But I _am_ a girl," I shouted at them. “Which means that I _am_ acting like a girl!” But I knew what they meant: they wanted a daughter who had long hair and wore skirts and brought home boys and dreamed about a husband and a house and babies. Not one who shaved her head, and kept a stash of her brother’s old porno mags under her bed, and quit school because she kept getting punished for fist fights that other people started.

But my humiliation doesn’t matter, because he’s forgotten me already, and so has Trina. He’s looking at her like he’s a starving man and she’s a steak. “How would you like,” he asks, smooth as glass and cold as ice, “to get away from here? I’ve got a nice place uptown. You deserve better than this, sweetheart.” He’s smiling, but the smile doesn’t go all the way up to his eyes. His teeth are perfectly straight and even and white like a toothpaste ad, but it somehow makes me think of Jaws. I don’t like him at all, not any more, and not just because he pushed me or because he didn't want to take me with him.

It's because he scares me, and I don’t like being scared.

Already he has his arm around Trina's waist. He's herding her away toward his purple Porsche. The Hudson slaps up against the pylons behind me, like it's applauding that she's going away, and I feel sick watching her go, like I’m never going to see her again. “Call me at the corner phone!” I shout after her. “You better fuckin' call me!”

She tosses a glance full of pity over her shoulder. “I _will_ , ok?” But he’s propelling her forward quickly, her high heels scraping on the uneven pavement, like he doesn’t want her to talk to me anymore. Already, he’s drawing a line between us, between our world and his. It’s all I can do not to cry.

  
* * *

  
Trina calls me three days later. I won’t even pretend that I wasn’t scared shitless when I didn’t hear from her right away. My mind kept flashing on Miz Chardonnay’s sad little MISSING signs, her drunken rants about how all the girls are going away and no one cares. Would she have made one for Trina soon? I didn’t even want to think about it. I camped out outside the bodega on Christopher in case the pay phone rang. I gave $3 to Pablito, the bodega owner’s son, to keep an eye it and come find me at the Piers or at Miz Chardonnay’s if anyone called. It was the last of my cash; I went to the Gristedes on 14th street and lifted a package of hot dogs for dinner.

I was so relieved to hear her voice, I thought I’d die. I wedged myself in the phone booth to drown out the sound of traffic and boom boxes. But once I knew she was ok, it kind of pissed me off again. I didn't know what I felt or wanted to feel-- I mean, she had left me behind, but I couldn’t help but be curious. “What’s it like?” I asked, trying hard to sound like I didn’t really care. 

“Oh my god, Miko, you wouldn’t believe it! I have my own room, and it’s got a canopy bed, and a closet full of clothes-- they’re mostly too big for me, like they belonged to someone else, but they mostly still have tags on them. Like, I am wearing a skirt from Fiorucci that cost eighty dollars! And get this-- you will not believe this-- he gave me a diamond ring! It’s absolutely perfect! It’s got a little ruby on each side.”

I don’t know what Fiorucci is, but her voice sounds dreamy, just like it did when she was talking about how she was going to get him to marry her and take her away to Westchester. And now she has a diamond ring; her dream is coming true. “That’s really good,” I tell her, I’m suddenly too sad to talk anymore. I tell her I that someone is waiting to use the phone and I’ve got to go.

  
* * *

  
Three more days and she calls again. She’s still raving about her new wardrobe, and how he’s going to get her a consultation with a plastic surgeon, but something has changed in her voice, and she doesn’t sound so excited anymore. I won’t lie: I’m sort of a little bit happy about that. But I want to be a good friend, so I ask her what’s going on.

She hesitates, then says “Oh, I don’t know... it’s just that--” It’s like she has a secret that she can’t decide she wants to blab or not. 

“God, Trina, just tell me, for Christ’s sake!” I’m getting impatient, and this time there really is someone waiting to use the phone. Each time they tap on the glass, I turn around and flip them the bird behind my back, but this just seems to make them more intent on sticking around.

“Ok, “ she sighs. “So...he keeps going on trips. He says it’s because he needs to visit the other girls.”

I don’t see what the big deal is, I tell her. It’s not like she didn’t know there were other girls.

“Well, it’s just that, when he goes, he locks me in the apartment. I’m not allowed to go anywhere when he’s not here.”

Somewhere in my head, a little bell is ringing.

“He says it’s for my own good. He says he doesn’t want to have to worry about me going back to the piers or something. Like I would! No offense. And it’s not like this place isn’t fabulous-- I mean, he’s got cable TV with all the pay channels, and I can watch whatever I want, and there’s a full fridge, and a bathtub with a jacuzzi, so it’s not like I really _need_ to leave, but still...He keeps telling me that he’s going to introduce me that plastic surgeon, but then something always comes up.”

“Do you want me to come over?” I ask, torn between hope that there might still be room for me in her new life, and still being angry with her-- and with him.

“No!” She almost shouts it. “No guests. He made me promise.”

“What else did he make you promise?” I grumble under my breath, not really expecting an answer.

“Well, uh--” She’s got her tell-or-don’t-tell voice on again. “There’s this key. He’s got it hanging on a little hook by the front door. I asked him what it was for-- I thought maybe it was for the front door, and maybe if it was, I could sneak out and get it copied so that I could get out when he goes away. Or else maybe it was for the liquor cabinet, which would also be good. But when I asked, he got angry. Like, scary-angry, but in a super quiet way, you know? And he says it’s for his work room, and if he ever catches me in there, he’ll kill me. Jesus Christ, Miko, I was freaking out! I mean, I think he really meant it!”

“So don’t go in there!” I tell her, trying to play it off like a joke, but I remember his shark-tooth smile and how it didn’t reach his eyes, and suddenly I’m really, really scared for Trina. But I don’t want her to know it, because I don’t want her to wig out. And maybe it’s nothing! Maybe he just keeps porn in there or something, like he's into bondage and shit and he's got a bunch of whips and chains in there he doesn't want anyone to know about. Or maybe he lied about being a businessman and he’s rich because he’s a big-time coke dealer or something and he’s afraid she’ll get into his stash. I mean, she totally would, so it’s not like he’s totally off base. But just in case, I ask, “Do you want me to call the cops?”

She sighs. “No. It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. But now I can’t stop thinking about that room!” 

  
* * *

  
Miz Chardonnay was drunk and on a tear, so I went out to sit on the stoop so I didn’t have to listen to her railing and wailing about all the people who have left her behind. When she’s this drunk, she slips out of her Miz Chardonnay character and just sounds like a miserable old man. Like David Wilton. That’s the name on the little mailbox out in the hallway. There’s nothing much I can do but roll her on her side so she doesn’t choke if she pukes. I’m just about to get up and make sure she hasn’t slipped back over onto her back when Pablito comes running down the block like the devil’s on his tail.

“Miko! Miko!” He is shouting, even though he knows I’ve already seen him. “Come quick! Your friend is on the phone and she says she got to talk to you _now!_ ” He looks spooked. My stomach plummets. I don’t even wait for him, I leave him to catch his breath on the sidewalk in front of Miz Chardonnay’s building. The drunk old queen’s voice follows me up the street like a ghost, like the soundtrack to a scary movie.

I can hardly talk by the time I get to the phone, which is swinging in the booth at the end of its metal cord. I just pick it up and gasp “Trina!”

The terror I hear on the other end of the line cuts through me like a knife. “Miko! Oh God, Miko! I went into the room!” she screams. “They’re all dead! They aren’t in Hollywood, they aren't modeling, they’re all in there-- in that room!”

I can’t even get my head around what she’s telling me, like this must be some sort of sick joke, like she’s just gotten so bored up there that she’s just messing with me for fun. “Stop playing,” I demand. It almost sounds like I’m begging her, and I sort of am, but even as I say it, I’m thinking of Miz Chardonnay and of all those crooked, hand-written signs she’s made, and I want to throw up.

“I’m not playing!” Trina’s hysterical now. “Those girls are all in that room, dead! All of them! And I’m going to be next! Oh, fuck! Fuck! He’s going to know I went in there, and he’s going to fucking kill me!”

My mind is racing a thousand miles an hour. I don’t know what to do, but I know I’ve got to get her to calm down. “He’s not going to know,” I tell her. “Calm down. Keep it together, Tree. There’s no way he’s going to know unless you tell him, and you’re not going to tell him. You’re going to calm down, and…and we’re going to figure out some way to get you out of there.”

“He’ll know!” she screams. “There’s blood on the key and it won’t come off! No matter how hard I scrub, it won’t come off!” I don’t understand what she means, but I can’t get her to explain it. Her voice cracks, and suddenly it hits me that for all our tough-act bullshit, we’re still kids. We’re just kids, and we are in way the fuck over our heads. “Oh God, Miko...Miko, I don’t want to die here! I want to go home!”

The worst thing of all is this: there’s no home for her to go to. There’s no home for any of us.

“I’m going to come get you,” I tell her. And I am. I make her repeat the address three times. I know I won’t forget it. Not ever. 

“You can’t get in without a key,” she whines.

I think of all the fire escapes I’ve climbed, all the drainpipes I’ve shinnied. Of how breaking into peoples’ apartments to steal tape decks and tv's has finally paid off. “I don’t need a key.”

But then she screams. Once, long and terrible. I'm screaming her name into the receiver but no-one's answering. There’s an awful sound, like something being hit-- I don’t want to know what-- and then the screaming stops and the phone is slammed down. A brief moment of silence, then a dial tone. I think I pissed myself a little bit.

In a moment of desperation, I dial 911 and try to tell the operator about how my friend is being murdered on East 77th street, about how there are a bunch of bodies in a room, and it’s probably Carla and Vanessa and Jeanie but I'm not sure, and now he’s going to kill my friend, too, but I can’t make the words come out right. I'm talking in a jumble. The operator gets angry and tells me not to fool around on the phone, that 911 is just for emergencies, and then the line goes dead again. I should have known: no one will believe me, no one will care. The Police’ll just say she was asking for it. 

No, they’ll say _he_ was asking for it, meaning Trina-- they won’t even let her be a girl. 

I bolt back to Miz Chardonnay’s, and with each step my stomach's crawling up my throat, a white-hot knot of panic. She’s passed out now, no fucking use at all, with the nearly-empty vodka bottle dangling from her fingers and raccoon rings of bleeding mascara making a sooty river down her slack cheeks. Her wig has come off; underneath it, it’s easy to tell she’s a man, hairline grey and receding. I want to kick it across the room, to rip it apart with my bare hands and throw all the plasticky red strands all over her face. Everything in the world is ugly, is fake. 

The gun is in the bedside table, just like Trina said. I've never held a gun before, and it’s heavy, much heavier than I thought it would be. It makes all of this become real, like the world has just switched from black and white to technicolor. I check to see that it’s loaded like I’d seen people do in the movies. I’m convinced it’s just going to go off in my hands and blow a hole through the floor or something, but it doesn’t, so I stick it down the back of my jeans, hoping like hell it doesn’t go off and shoot me in the ass. I rifle through her purse until I find a subway token, and then I run, and I run, and I run.

It takes me half an hour to get across town and up the East side. The 6 train is packed; it’s rush-hour. People are going home from work and I’m invisible to them, just some freak girl from the Village. I know nothing about their lives, and they know nothing about mine; there are a thousand different worlds in this city, and it’s like none of them intersect at all. All this crazy shit is happening, really happening, and none of these people know it. It doesn’t touch them at all. I imagine myself screaming, pulling out the gun and shooting it through the roof of the car, wanting to get their attention, to make them listen, to force them to see me, to know that horrible things that are happening _right now_ while they're staring dead-eyed at the dark blur of the subway walls. But I don't. I just grip the pole and shake.

The plum-colored Porsche is parked in front of the building. The only way I’m going to get in is to break in, and to do that, I have to backtrack to 76th street and hope I can find a way to get between the buildings. Half way down the block, there’s a building where the gate to the trash cans has been left open on the ground floor. I dart through the narrow passage, through the tiny back yards like private parks that the rich people don't have to share with junkies and bums, up one fence and over another. Stretching up my arms, I can barely reach the bottom of the fire escape, but when I do, I’m up to the top floor in no time, my body somehow working when my mind has nearly frozen, then scrambling across the connected rooftops until I reach the right building: I can see the Porsche down on the street. When I drop back down the ladder to the top-floor landing, I can smell the sweat and rust on my hands. People sometimes say blood smells like metal; I wonder if it smells like rust and sweat. I'm breathing so hard I want to puke, but I can't stop now. Cupping my hands to the window, I can see the giant bed with its white canopy, the enormous closet full of clothes that didn’t quite fit-- clothes that maybe belonged to Carla or Vanessa or Jeanie or God knows who else-- maybe Miz Chardonnay is the only one who remembers them all, who cries out their names in a drunken rage so that someone, somewhere, will remember them. And Trina…Oh God...Trina...

There is blood on the floor.

A car door slams, a motor revs, tires screech. I’m back up on the roof in an instant, my legs burning and cramping with the exertion, the stitch in my side a dagger between my ribs. The gun jams into the small of my back, the metal warm like my skin now, but hard and lethal. I lean over the edge of the building just in time to see the tail lights of the Porsche before it turns onto Second Avenue. He’s gone; Trina is in there alone. Is: present tense. I still have hope, if only just a little.

The window is open just a crack, just enough to wedge my fingers under it and push it up. Why didn’t Trina just go out the fire escape, I wonder? Damn it, why couldn’t she have been smart just this once and gone down the fucking fire escape!? As soon as I find her, I’m going to beat the shit out of her myself just for being so stupid. One leg and then the other slips slowly over the sill. Even though I watched the car speed away, I still expect someone to walk in while I’m half in and half out, but no one does. The floorboards don't make a sound when I put my feet down. The wood is perfectly polished and catches the sun; so does the blood. It's so clean in here-- and so awful. 

At first, I whisper Trina's name. Then I say it out loud.

Something reaches out to me from under the white dust ruffle on the bed. It's Trina's hand, and when I see it, I shout her name like I'm going to force her to answer me back. But she doesn’t. So I kneel down before I fall down, my legs not quite working right, and I grab her hand and pull, pull her out from under the bed where she's hiding. I want to tell her that it's ok, it's going to be ok, but my mouth doesn't work, and then I'm falling over backward because her hand isn’t attached to anything. It’s just a hand, cool and stiff and still. A hand with neon pink nails and a diamond ring with a ruby on either side. I roll to my knees and wretch until I think my stomach is going to come out of my mouth, but there’s nothing in me to throw up. There’s shiny blood on the shiny floor, and Trina’s hand in my hand, and nothing else. I know it now: the rest of her is in the locked room, the room she wasn’t supposed to know about, and there’s nothing I can do to help her. She’s just another dead girl who had dreams that didn’t come true.

I fight to breathe in the thick air, the pressure on my chest wants to strangle me. My ears are stoppered up, and all I can hear in my head is the thumping of my heart, and a high-pitched hum like the static of a TV that's gone out. Someone in the room is crying, and it takes a minute before I realize it's me. _I'm_ the one who's crying. Trina is dead, and there is her hand, and I’m here, and what the fuck am I going to do now? Everything is wrong! None of this was supposed to happen! But there's nothing I can do to make this stop, to make this be ok. Trina is dead, and the gun is pressing into my back.

And then I know. I know what I’m going to do. I mean, it's the only thing I _can_ do. It’s too late for Trina, just like it's too late for Carla and Vanessa and Jeanie, and I don't want to even think about who else, but it’s not too late for me. It's not. I can't fix this-- I can't fix any of it-- but I can make it stop. I can. The gun is in my hands now, a dark heavy weight making my arms burn. The hammer clicks when I cock it, and something shifts inside me. All I need to do is wait. No matter how long it takes, that's all I have to do now. My hands have stopped shaking. I’m not Miko anymore; I’m just a girl with all the time in the world to wait for the sound of a key in a lock. I’m a girl who’s lost all her dreams. And I am going to show Blueblood what a girl without dreams can do.


End file.
